When an earthquake occurs near a town or city it can cause lots of damage. In areas where there are lots of earthquakes, engineers must design earthquake-proof buildings which sway with the motion of the earthquake, rather than cracking and breaking. But what kind of structures do you think make good earthquake-proof buildings?
In this experiment you can make some earthquake-proof buildings of your own, using cocktail sticks and marshmallows. Give them a shake on some wobbly jelly to simulate an earthquake, and see how well the hold up!
Hot magma beneath a volcano always wants to move up towards the surface. This is because it is a hot liquid and is less dense that the surrounding rock and so rises upwards. But as a magma rises it cools and eventually turns into solid rock...
In this experiment you will see what happens when melted wax moves through layers of sand and water, just like magma moves through layers of rock to reach the Earth's surface.
Download the instructions and information sheet
When molten rock (magma) is underground it often has lots of gases dissolved in it, just like liquid coke is full of dissolved carbon dioxide gas. As magma rises closer to the surface the gas starts to escape (exsolves) from the magma, but what happens then?
In this experiment you can use coke to represent magma under a volcano and see what happens when all the dissolved gas is released!
Download the instructions and information sheet
About the Session
This set of activities covers and expands on the Year 3 national curriculum unit "light", using objects from the Whipple Museum to explore:
Shadows (sundials)
Microscopes
Telescopes
Reflection and refraction
Transparent, translucent and opaque
Duration: Can be booked as:
One or more museum-led online sessions (up to an hour in total length) and a loans box of equipment for groups of up to six
or
To make your zine you will need:
- a sheet of paper
- coloured pencils or pens
- coloured paper
- some glue
- fossils, rocks, pebbles for inspiration
Download the zine folding instructions and watch the video below
How does burning fossil fuels threaten Antarctic marine life?
This experiment demonstrates the link between increasing carbon dioxide levels and ocean acidification and freshening oceans. Freshwater and more acidic water in the oceans make life harder for Antarctica’s marine animals.
The experiment and video were made by Nick Barrett. Nick is a PhD student at the University of Cambridge Earth Science Department and The British Antarctic Survey investigating the resistance of Antarctic marine species to predicted freshening and lower salinity in the Southern Ocean.
Did you know the first bees would have been flying around in the Cretaceous just as ‘Iggy’ our Iguanodon was snacking on leaves from tall trees? At the Sedgwick Museum we have two 20million year old honey bees trapped in amber. Found on Yarmouth beach in 1891.
Amy Smith studies bees Plant Sciences in Cambridge. In this activity Amy shows us how to make a bee-autiful fluffy bumble bee. You will need some card and wool.
Volcanoes form when hot molten rock (magma) under the ground erupts at the surface, but what causes the molten rock to erupt? Eruptions are often driven by gases escaping…
In this experiment you can start a chemical reaction that creates a gas, and see how the gas escaping drives an eruption.
This experiment and video was devised by the Volcano Seismology group in the Earth Science Department, University of Cambridge.
There are many different types of volcanoes. Shield volcanoes have a broad rounded shape and gentle splattery eruptions often described as fire fountains. Strato volcanoes are sharp and steep sided and have violent explosive eruptions. But what makes these two types of volcano look and erupt so differently? It is mainly controlled by how think (viscous) or runny the magma in the volcano is...
In this experiment you can use 3 different thickness (viscosity) liquids to see what differences runny or thick magma can cause in volcanoes.
It is really unusual for a palaeontologist (scientist who study fossils) to find a complete skeleton with all the bones in the right place. We are more likely to find only a few bones or a jumbled up skeleton.
Putting a skeleton back to together when you know what the animal looks like can be a challenge, but imagine how hard that becomes when there are no more of those creatures alive for you look at. It is a bit like trying to put a jigsaw puzzle together when you don’t have the photo on the box as a guide.
